


Cowbird in the Cuckoos

by Cadhla



Category: FreakAngels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-13
Updated: 2008-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:18:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does a normal girl like Alice think when she's confronted with the proof that the human race never stops evolving?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cowbird in the Cuckoos

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Velleity

 

 

First it's a feeling. No words, no pictures (bastards probably get words and pictures and everything when they're talking to each other and that's why they look at us that way, like the whole world is their ant farm and we're just the little soldiers running forever in tunnels what don't ever end), just a feeling. Could be the best feeling in the world, could be the best feeling in the world, and I don't _know_ , that's the fucking problem, I don't _know_. Nobody gets to know but _them_. Because my head's too small, or maybe the feeling's too big, and all I know for sure is that when one of them looks all the way through me, the world just goes away for a minute, like static on the telly when the cable cuts out.

(Shit. Not much longer before that sentence doesn't make sense to anybody, is it? Not in real terms, not in the kind of time that actually matters anymore. The world _ended_ , mate, and the only thing all those old stories got wrong was us. We weren't supposed to last longer than the world did. Not lasting longer than the world did was one of the only things that everybody was _sure_ of. But here we are, and there went the world, and what the bloody fuck are we supposed to do now?)

After the feeling goes, after your brain shakes off the static and starts looking like a brain again, that's when you start to see the rest of them, and it makes just as little sense as that horrible, wonderful, not-at-all-real feeling. They haven't got a race, or if they do, that race is `them.' Maybe their parents were British or Irish or African or Pakistani and I'm pretty sure one of them would've been Japanese if she hadn't been whatever the hell it is they are, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, it doesn't matter what their parents were, because their kids are something else. Something new. Maybe they'll fare better in this world than the rest of us -- maybe that's why the world made them, because the human races it has are basically done for, but it wasn't finished with the species. (Anybody who says we're a human race is just plain mental. A human species, sure, but we've got buckets and buckets of races. They just have the one. They just have the them. If they keep happening, I reckon eventually, they're all that's going to be anywhere. Just the them. Hope the world likes them.)

It's those damn eyes. Those big purple eyes. There was this film star, right? My folks used to watch her on telly, back when there was such a thing as telly (and such a thing as film stars, come to think of it). Her name was something every-damn-day, Susan or Mary or Liz or something. (Laurie, maybe. Laurie Taylor. No, that's not right. Damn.) So here she was, this woman with the everybody's-called-that name, and these _eyes_ , these big purple eyes, and you'd look at her and hope, all the way down in the bottom of your stomach, that they were a special effect. That somebody, somewhere, was having us on, that she didn't really have those _eyes_. It's not that they weren't beautiful, because they were beautiful. It was just that they were _wrong_. Nobody's supposed to have eyes like that, nobody's supposed to look at you like she did. And these people, this _them_ , they all have those eyes, only those eyes times a million, because they're the same sort of purple that you see in your head when you go to bed at night, that sunset-sunrise-amethyst-fresh berry color that isn't supposed to exist in the real world. It's not supposed to be anywhere outside your head, and there it is, right there, in their eyes.

They're all of them slim and pale and sharp in the face, even the ones whose bodies aren't sharp at all; they're all of them clever with their hands and cunning with their words and easier with their laughter than anybody I've heard for years and years, like they know that nobody's ever going to get close enough to hurt them. I almost did. I almost hurt them. I was being driven by a feeling that wasn't good or bad or anything at all, a feeling tossed at me by a bastard with those unreal eyes who thought killing my family and making me into a missile was good for a lark. Didn't leave me anything to go back to. Didn't expect as I'd be coming back, I'd wager, since people who're willing to do that sort of thing generally don't bank on folks like me surviving.

They're all of them one people, and they seem mostly the good sort; they seem like they'll be kind, however odd they might be. That's something, anyway, because I don't think there's any going back once this sort of line's been drawn in the sand, once it's been stepped over. Once there are feelings that folks like me don't get to feel clear enough to comprehend. I suppose they'll keep coming, all pale and thin and violet-eyed, that they'll spread like ripples spreading through water, only when they hit the edge of the pond, there won't be any water anymore; just ripples, going on forever. Ripples on ripples on ripples.

That's them.

There was this movie once. It didn't have Laurie Taylor in it, and I don't even think I was supposed to be watching it, I was too young, but I did. There was this village, and all the women got pregnant all at once, even the ones who hadn't done it with anybody. When the children came, they weren't British or Irish or African or Pakistani. They were a them, and all of them were pale, and all of them had these impossible eyes, like they were trying to look right through everything. In the end, they turned out to be bad, they turned out to want to end the world and take it away from all the people who were still people. But that was just a movie, and this is the real world, this drowned world, with its rusting foundations and its lists of the dead.

These people, this them, they're not the same. I don't think they're the same. Please don't let them be the same. There's nothing that can tell me one way or the other.

I've just got to trust the feeling. And I still don't know whether it's good or bad. God help me, I don't know. 

 


End file.
